


Photography

by wisdomeagle



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Biting, Desert, F/M, Photography, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-09-02
Updated: 2005-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-17 20:46:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4680941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wisdomeagle/pseuds/wisdomeagle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The camera's eye distorts, contorts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Photography

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Karabair (likeadeuce)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/likeadeuce/gifts).



> For karabair in the [Wesley PWP-thon](http://www.livejournal.com/users/versaphile/1296930.html?style=mine). She wanted photography and taking a trip together.

It is profane to picture this as black-and-white stills hung in a dark room somewhere in the depths of Wolfram + Hart, but there is the camera, shuttered against the edge of the cliff, its film heavy with images of the white desert and pale yellow grasses, wispy and impossible. He cannot perceive any of this as the camera will; all he sees is Lilah's curves, bending into him as light refracts, hitching up against his thigh, drawing a long shudder that pierces his lungs. Click. The moment is framed with hot bright sunlight, shimmering so visibly that it's hard to believe all they're seeing is mirage. LA is smoke and mirrors, dreary alleys and darkness where nothing is what it claims to be; the desert is deceptively honest, bright and broad and sandy yellow. It is photographed, and the black-and-white of the photography hides the red of Lilah's lips, obscenely unmarred despite his kisses. He cannot wipe away her lipstick, cannot smear or smudge her pale pink cheeks. Her facepaint is permanently scarring, hiding her true face. He bites savagely at her shoulder, but she only laughs.

"Know what the camera can't see, lover?"

He bites down harder, waits for the scream. Lilah always screams.

"It can't see what's inside here." Her hand hovers over his chest, tickling his hair, teasing at something unexpressed. The camera shudders and frames this shot: white teeth, white flesh, hands flirting over skin and always in the moment before she condescends to touch him. "Your ugly, dirty, gray soul."

"All the camera can see is grays, Lilah." He's released the nub of flesh; her shoulder has his bite-mark but the skin isn't broken. This will heal; this will not scar; they will not remember this when the sun goes down and their days begin. 

"Can't see what isn't there, Wes." She pats his chest almost fondly and hooks a leg around his waist. His trousers, dark green, will turn black in the camera's gaze. Stare too long at a picture of them, and your mind will undo itself. He-and-she will blend; the sharp angles and divides of her pale skin, his hard muscles, the wisps of hair that slip out from her panties, hardly visible in the camera's far-away and objective eye. _Objective_ ; he laughs, slides further down Lilah's bare skin, bunches her skirt around her waist and feels for the escaping hair with two deft fingers, then with his tongue, lapping against the sodden pink silk of her undergarments, his mouth full of hair and wetness. She squirms eagerly. Click-click -- the camera eats this up, devours the privacy and immediacy of their intimacy and makes it public, profane.

The camera's eye eroticizes the heat of the sand, burning exposed skin and making them jump and twist when they linger too long in the unshaded eye of the sun. Despite the generously lathered sunscreen, they'll be burnt in the evening, and will be reminded during the course of their duty, by bite-marks and scalded thighs, by satiation and by sunburn, that they made love in the desert and their bodies' heat was consumed by the sun's (the sungod: Aten, Apollo, Hyperion. Too many names, one great deity) own heat, wavering in the air and rippling illusions through their eyes.

The camera's eye zooms out on the whole desert, more brilliant-lit than Hollywood's imagination, and then in on two fingers slipping beneath silk to find the hard nub of Lilah's clit. The camera swivels and averts its eye, choosing the more artistic angle: Lilah's head thrown back, her neck exposed like vampire bait, her lips curving to form the "oh" of her arousal.

The presence of the camera makes the scene visual and visceral, and Wesley feels the encounter in curves and angles, in the lines that create shapes, which in turn differentiate objects. The line across Lilah's thighs where her skirt ends and her skin begins, the place where their picnic basket (wine and sunscreen, a package of condoms -- their camera equipment occupies its own bag, behind the tripod, maintaining the illusion that the camera is self-sufficient, existing in the desert as habitually as the spotted lizard, the gecko, the quail) settles into the sand, creating a home for itself. 

As he homes his way down her thighs and tickles the underside of her knee, as he drops his tongue into her navel and draws circles that climax at her clit, he feels the camera on his hands and mouth, staging this, describing their bodies' touch as a series of moments, each one obscene but not pornographic, the slim emotions of desire and despair erased by the too-brilliant desert light, the too-scientific process of dying and drying the negatives, creating images from their opposites, creating light from darkness, darkness from light.

Lilah gasps, low tones hitching higher towards the stiletto scream of climax that pierces the silence and the illusion, makes their world real, fulfills the moment and answers the question. The scream is high and shrill and is torn away by the vast sands, echoing emptily, perhaps forever. Every still moment of sex is penetrated, enhanced, retroactively enforced by Lilah's scream, and she christens the desert, exploits the wilderness and its wildlife.

"The sun's setting," she whispers, hauling herself up to sit beside him, arms tousled around his shoulders like a misplaced boa. "It'll be dark soon. There's evil to destroy back in the city, and havoc to cause, depending on what side you're playing tonight."

"At least I've chosen a side."

"Have you?" Her raised eyebrow can cut through lies like a voice crying out in the wilderness. "What side is it tonight, Pryce?"

"Will your camera take a picture of the sun going down?"

"You going down was far more interesting."

"It seems such a waste, trying to photograph those colors. It's -- it's lovely." Pink and orange and purple, the last streaks of polluted sky dissolving from dusky blue to dusty purple to black.

"We need to get back to work."

"I know."


End file.
